Below are the statistics that I captured for this site’s eighth anniversary. This year’s numbers are followed by the corresponding numbers for the previous years (A.D. 2015 / 2014 / 2013 / 2012 / 2011 / 2010 / 2009).

I have again neglected the site for much of the year. However, I converted my publishing platform to ExpressionEngine 3 during the late winter, which was the first major technical change to Arimathea since the early years. The update provided a good occasion to do some backstage cleaning; hopefully, Arimathea (technically) now functions better as a web page. Unfortunately, the content has not seen such enhancement.

Below are the statistics that I captured for this site’s seventh anniversary. This year’s numbers are followed by the corresponding numbers for the previous years (A.D. 2014 / 2013 / 2012 / 2011 / 2010 / 2009).

I assume that most of my hits continue to be bots. Such is obviously true from the comments that I receive. I wonder what an alien anthropologist would think of our society from the spam comments that Arimathea gets. Moreover, the spam has significantly increased. Years ago, I disabled captchas for commenting because they annoy some people and confuse others. However, it has become too burdensome to comb through thousands of spammy comments on the off chance that a real reader had something to say. So, captchas have recently returned.

I have been rather negligent of posting this past year—with less frequency, less substantial articles, and more “linky” entries. During the course of each day, I think of several good post ideas, but I tend to let them pass into the abyss of faded memories.

Unlike previous years, I have not included the stats for the comment pages, as they are ridiculously spambotish.

I continue to get regular search engine traffic, but referrals from the Orthosphere have been prominent during the last year. Furthermore, Arimathea continues to frustrate internet seekers for “teendogsex” (see “Perverted Trolls”). I find a few of these bizarre search referrals (usually “+teen +dog +sex”) each month, and I always look up their I.P. addresses. Most of my visitors looking for ephebophilic bestiality come from Pakistan and India. I suspect that there is a sordid cultural current on the subcontinent which I have no interest to investigate further.

This anniversary update is post 1,149. Arimathea’s productivity has declined since its early years, but I hope that the site offers something of value every now and then.

The remaining hits were for non-existent pages (type 404) and various test pages.

The very slight increase in comment preview hits (only 141) means that my struggle against spambots is achieving desired results.

The most interesting search that led to my site occurred on August 23, when someone Google searched “real+Cincinnati+crackwhore+photos.” I e-mailed that to my brothers at the time, and Aaron responded, “Thank God they found what they were looking for.”

My most viewed entry used to be “Darth Bowlly,” as someone posted a link to it from Wikipedia. However, “Chicken Sexuality” has clearly overtaken it. Inquiring minds want to know!

The remaining hits were for non-existent pages (404) and various test pages.

As before, I suspect that more than half of my hits are from spambots. I receive many spammy comments, and the spam would explain the high numbers for the comments preview page. There are currently ninety-five real comments that I have not deleted, and the discrepancy shows how robotic the visits are.

New phenomena this year have been searches for spammy comments. In addition to intelligible search terms that visitors have submitted (e.g. evolution, Gospel, Newport, sex), I see regular searches for url=http://wasteyourtime.com/uselesspill.html. Who knew that remedies for erections, skin blemishes, baldness, and obesity took up so much of the nation’s attention? It is another testament to the veracity of Idiocracy.

My site’s top referrer has been Google. It is interesting to see what terms lead folks to my page. The world is a fascinating place.

Arimathea turns two years old today. If you visit regularly, I would like to thank you. Looking back, I have posted far less in the past year than in the first year, but I suppose that one’s enthusiasm for blogs is normally greater when they are new. Here is a snapshot of the page’s current statistics (with last year’s anniversary stats in parentheses), listed in descending order of popularity:

The huge number of comments preview strikes suggests the activity of roaming spam bots. I have had problems with my comments function since the beginning. Captchas would not work, people would complain that the system would not let them comment, and I found out that I had inadvertently banned people from commenting who were using certain browsing platforms. Thus, I have no idea how many people tried to comment on my page over the last two years. A few months ago, I decided to get rid of the spam protections and simply go through the motions of reviewing all comments before they posted. The number of spam comments has increased dramatically, but few people comment. Therefore, a large portion of my site’s traffic has been automated, which bruises my blogger ego.

Among the amusing words in my search log, I find: jew, plymouth, coulter, mother, and boozette. I refuse to mention others.

The top referrer for this site over the last year has been a Wikipedia entry on Al Bowlly. Someone used a post that I wrote on Bowlly as a reference for the article. It is amazing how many people visit my page just due to that link.

So, small beans, all and all, but it still provides an outlet for my ideas and a way to share web finds with friends and family.

Arimathea today celebrates its first anniversary. I actually did not get everything up and running until the third of October last year when I found a site host, but who cares about small details? When we allows ourselves to indulge in the narcissism of the age, we can confidently dispense with minutiae.

The stats must be a bore to everyone but me. I personally like to see how people read my page. I am surprised that so many people have clicked on the comments pages, though there have been so few comments. The current number is only fifty-three, though I have likely deleted a score. Still, it means that visitors click on pages with no comments frequently, as I cannot believe that so many people have clicked on the few posts with comments. I figure that many people click on the comments page as a form of permalink even when there are no comments. They must do this out of habit, as most blogs do not have separate permalink and comments pages. I have thought about combining both of them to meet the standard format, which might generate more commentary, but I like the look of a clean post page with no comments or comment form.

The order of realm popularity is not that surprising, either. However, I wanted to see how closely the popularity matched the number of posts. One would assume that the realms with more content would invite more hits, but visitor interest must play a role, too. Moreover, a realm would draw hits just for its existence, as a visitor does not know how many posts each realm has from the main page. So, here are the realms with the number of their entries and the number of their hits:

As expected, the philosophy realm came in first in both categories, as it is the page’s realm for aesthetic, anthrological, epistemological, ethical, metaphysical, physical, and political content. The music realm proved to be more popular than the religion and fun realms, though it had less posts. For a more rigorous analysis, I divided the number of realm hits (13,398) by the number of posts (365, one for each day), which gives us a mean of about 36.71 hits per post. The averages and deviations for the realms are:

Such gives us a standard deviation of almost 31.73, if I remember statistics correctly, though the Arimathea and commerce realms skew the result due to their small number of posts. Clearly, their relative popularity is driven by links from the main page.

The page also has had 916 non-spam referrals, with the largest source of traffic coming from search engines, especially Google. On such engines, the page regularly comes up as the second or third result with “Arimathea” as the search term. Take that, BibleFacts.com!

The site’s costs have been quite reasonable. I have paid $33.09 in the last year, and such includes the domain registration and an e-mail service. NearlyFreeSpeech is an excellent and inexpensive host if your site does not get much traffic. If you want a cheap blog with its own domain name and with maximized control, it would behoove you to consider NearlyFreeSpeech and ExpressionEngine software.

Anyway, thank you for visiting my third incarnation as a blogger. It may not be much, but it could be worse.

Arimathea has been online for almost six months, and I am happy to report that the number of total combined page hits is 18,418. 3,449 of those hits were for the main index page, and the remainder consists of the various thematic weblogs and permalinks. Sadly for my ego, only seventeen comments have been logged, and several of those are my responses. I could delude myself by thinking that after I post an entry, nothing further could said about an issue, but I would then be a fool. Far more likely, the lack of comments suggests a lack of interest in my rambling.

Until this week, Arimathea had not received any trackbacks. I was not even sure if Expression Engine’s trackback mechanism worked. Well, it surely does function. For the past several days, I have noticed trackbacks from different I.P. addresses to my “Christ Is Born!” post. Normally, I would be elated to have trackbacks, though confused that someone would be remarking about a Christmas post in late March. As it is, I am fairly annoyed and somewhat horrified. For each of these trackbacks leads to some perverted YouTube channel featuring various bestiality videos. I infer the content from the trackbacks’ descriptions; I certainly did not visit the sites. I would be shocked that such a thing existed anywhere on the internet, but I have received so much bizarre spam over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the web leads to any conceivable content. I once received an e-mail advertising “grandma barn porn.” I shudder to think what that possibly means. On a search engine, put in any three relatively common words, and you will find a site. The world holds many messed up folks.

However, I am surpised that YouTube has bestiality channels. I have read several accounts of YouTube’s shutting down conservative sites that feature Ann Coulter interviews or documentaries on militant Mohammedanism, but animal rape is fine with them? I suppose that it is possible that no one has reported such channels to YouTube’s administrators, yet. After all, who would visit “teendogsex” who is not already sympathetic to such activities?

Moreover, I am confused that these channel owners make trackbacks on a blog entry about Christmas—titled “Christ Is Born!” I have deleted these trackbacks for the last several days, and I cannot understand why they keep appearing. The basics of marketing tell us to speak to our audience. Is there something about the celebration of Christ’s birth that corresponds to this filth? Perhaps, there is a bot that simply makes trackbacks everywhere on the web, and it happened to find my Christmas post somehow. I looked over my post, and the following words could have triggered the bot: “Virgin” and “young Child” from the kontakion for the feast. I wish that I were kidding. O wretched earth . . .

The other disconcerting evidence of cultural decay that I have found through Arimathea involves my list of referring pages. This list shows the pages from which visitors to Arimathea come. An inordinate amount of visitors stumble upon my “Boy Movies” post from search engine queries. Somehow, I suspect that those queries were not seeking coming of age films, especially when the query terms include “fine body.” So, Arimathea manages both to attract bestiality pornographers and to disappoint trolling paedophiles. I never expected such diversity in the reading audience.

However, these facts confirm the old marketing adage that sex sells. Perhaps, I should strive for double entendres in my titles, like my “Man Candy” post. My poetic abilities are quite limited; so, I am not sure that I can manage such creativity. One must set goals for himself, though. When I cover a local Virginian autumn harvest festival, I can title it, “Endless Goat Action,” or when I comment upon a contentious debate, I may name it, “Heated Man on Man.” My page hits will skyrocket.

Welcome to Arimathea, the online presence of me—a Cincinnatian named Joseph. Now, I know that every Tom, Dick, and Harry has an internet site these days. So, why should I clutter cyberspace with yet more armchair philosophizing? Well, I expect that the only folks likely to read this page are my family and friends, but I sometimes have a need for mental catharsis. Moreover, I egotistically figure that someone else might appreciate my ideas every now and then.

My knowledge of web design is rudimentary at best, but I have been learning. I still cannot figure out how to make the feeds work, and I expect that I shall tinker with the layout and code in perpetuity. However, I am going to start posting; torpedoes and faulty url paths be damned. If you find that the layout does not appear comely in your browser under normal monitor conditions, or if you find broken links, please let me know.

The basic structure of the page is a series of “weblogs” dedicated to various themes. You can access these different topical realms on the left side menu. Within each topical realm, there are various categories. The main page on which this entry is posted will serve for personal and site news. Each realm has its own imported feeds, links (“blogroll”), and patron saint. The general patron saint for the page, as for me, is Joseph of Arimathea, naturally.

I always appreciate friendly or thoughtfully critical comments. There are nutties swarming about, though; so, please only use your first name. Cheers!